SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch was delayed again yesterday, this time due to high winds. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said back on April 5 that because this is the first launch of Falcon Heavy's Block 5, the latest and most powerful version of its boosters, they are being "extra cautious." Mission managers are now targeting this evening, again at 6:35 p.m. EDT, with an approximately two-hour launch window.
You can watch the livestream here or on SpaceX's website.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/w ...read more
After a nearly seven-week adventure since its launch, the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft will attempt make history today and touch down on the surface of the moon at 10:25 p.m. Israel time (2:25 p.m. Central). It’s a monumental undertaking and if it succeeds, Beresheet and its creators will join the select ranks of those who have safely landed on the moon - thus far only the United States, China, and the former Soviet Union.
NASA and its Deep Space Network are aiding the mission i ...read more
In anthropology, bones don't always tell the whole story. Ancient remains can be so rare that an entire species of hominids can be compressed into one single fragment of bone. Thousands of generations, millions of individuals, epic untold stories — and our only insight is a stray tooth, or a few curving shards of skull.
That leaves us without a true view of who these people were, even when it comes to our most recent ancestors, like the Neanderthals or the Denisovans. But a new study ...read more
Space travel, you may have heard, is hard. Hard on the brain, to design ways to slip the surly bonds of Earth in the first place, but also hard on the body, which needs to withstand conditions it was never designed for. If NASA’s serious about sending humans back to the moon and on to Mars, we’ll need to get a much better grasp on how spaceflight affects the human body. And instead of simply flying more and more people to space to find out all the potential effects, scientists have t ...read more
The European Space Agency's ExoMars spacecraft failed to find any traces of methane on the Red Planet during its hunt from April to August of 2018. This goes directly against recent positive reports of methane by ESA's own Mars Express spacecraft and NASA's Curiosity rover, which both saw methane in 2013.
ExoMars has a sensitive detector that can pick up just one-tenth the amount of methane that Mars Express witnessed. That leaves two options: either one set of observations ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine